


Revisionist

by Anyawen



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: 007 Fest 2020, Alternate Histories, Don't copy to another site, F/M, Happy Ending, John Keats - Freeform, M/M, Retired Bond, Tall Tales, Time Travel, bond is a (not so secret) romantic, bond sneaked a proposal into another fic, fanny brawne - Freeform, holiday party, improving timelines, q likes poetry, team00
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:22:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25500550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anyawen/pseuds/Anyawen
Summary: Retired Bond is using a secret invention of Q's to revise history. Among the larger changes he's made, he can't help but try to improve the ending of the doomed love story of Q's favorite poet. And while he's building happy endings ...
Relationships: James Bond/Q, bill tanner/molly (mentioned), eve moneypenny/gareth mallory (hinted)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 39





	Revisionist

**Author's Note:**

> Fills 2020 007 fest Scavenger Hunt #17 - 'James Bond as a time traveller. Come up with three real historical events that bear the mark of his presence.' Twice, sort of - 3 events you'd expect him to be involved in, but he wasn't, and 3 events you'd never imagine he was involved in, but he was. Plus a bonus fill of sorts for a casual suggestion in the Bright Star watch party chat about a time traveling Q managing to give Keats and Fanny a happy ending. And also, here be rare pairs - Tanner/Molly, and Eve/Mallory.

“I’m not sure how drunk you think I am, Bond, but I can assure you, I’m not that drunk,” Mallory said with a chuckle.

“I’m not sure it’s possible to actually be that drunk without being dead,” Eve agreed, finishing her drink.

The three of them, with Q and Tanner —who was asleep with his head on the table— were seated around a table at the MI6 holiday party. Well, what was left of it.

Robert from Accounting was haunting the buffet, trying to eat the last of the oysters as catering was packing up around him. Melanie from IT and her fiance were still drifting around the dance floor to the sounds of the waitstaff clearing tables, the DJ long since having left. R was rounding up a gaggle of young Q-branch minions and herding them to the door. Q, watching, wasn’t sure if she planned to put them in a cab, or downstairs in the hall to sleep it off. Either way, he thought, waving, she had things under control.

“Did you put him up to this, Q?” Eve asked, pointing at him across the table.

“Absolutely not. What he gets up to in his retirement is totally up to him.”

“And you let him do whatever he wants?”

“Let him?”

“ _Let me_?”

Eve brushed aside their protests.

“Honestly,” Mallory interjected, “we expected you back within a month, bored out of your mind.”

“Some said a week, but then we realized that you’d be home with Q, and he’d find ways to keep you busy,” Eve said.

Mallory choked on the last of his wine.

“That’s not what I meant,” Eve said as she handed Mallory extra napkins. “Well. Maybe a little bit.”

“He keeps busy,” Q replied, then grinned. “And he keeps me busy.”

“And on that note,” Mallory said, putting the soiled napkins on his plate and pushing his chair back, “perhaps I should wake Tanner and see that he gets home.”

“Oh, no. Surely you can’t leave without hearing what sort of trouble James gets up to now. Or then, I guess. Time travel being what it is, and all. Or, are they things you get up to in the future? How does that work?”

“Can’t travel to a time that hasn’t happened yet, from my perspective,” James answered.

“I don’t think I want to hear him say that he’s responsible for the Great Fire of London,” Mallory replied. “The disasters he instigates are no longer my problem.”

“Wasn’t me,” James said. “Nor the Great Fire of Rome, either.”

“No? Chernobyl?”

“Also no.”

“Go on, then,” Tanner said, surprising them all as he righted himself, rubbing his face where it had been pressed against the table. “Tell us something you’ve done. In your time travels.”

“You do realize you can’t check?” Q asked. “If he can do what he claims, and has changed anything in his visits to the past, it has become your history? You’d never know it was any different than what it is now.”

“Perhaps,” Tanner agreed. “But it’ll be interesting anyway, to know what feats Bond wants to claim.”

James sat silent for a minute. Q wondered if he’d try to backtrack now, and claim it was all a joke to see how big a tall tale he could get away with.

“I once made an observation to a man about the weather. I noted how lovely the day was.”

“And was it?” Eve asked. “Was it a lovely day?”

“Bucketing down rain, actually.”

“So, you traveled in time to make an incorrect observation about the weather to someone.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“It stayed with him —the thought about the weather. I’d hoped it would, since I couldn’t say anything more direct. He had to solve it himself.”

“Solve what?”

“The Enigma Code.”

Mallory leaned his elbows on the table and stared at James.

“You’re saying that you spoke to Alan Turing, and gave him the key to solving Enigma.”

“How did you know what to tell him?” Tanner asked.

“Well, he’d solved it,” James said. “In the original timeline. He’d figured out the key in the morning weather report. But in the original timeline, he didn’t solve it until February of 1942.”

“It was 1941,” Mallory said. “He solved it in 1941.”

“Yes,” James agreed. “He did.”

“And you want us to believe that you told him how,” Eve said.

“Not at all,” James replied. “I didn’t tell him anything at all about the code. Couldn’t even if I’d wanted to. Don’t understand it, or the maths involved in his machine. No, all I did was talk about the weather, so it was on his mind when he went to work. He’s the one who let my random, obviously incorrect observation about the weather influence his thoughts, and he put things together a little earlier than he had before.”

“Neatly done,” Q said.

“Thank you.”

“It is a lovely story,” Eve said. “But as Q pointed out, we can’t verify it.”

“True.”

“Have you got another one?” Mallory asked.

“A few. I don’t do it often, and only after careful research. There’s a lot about the current state of the world that I don’t want to jeopardize by changing something big, or by accident. I tend to only try to influence events already in play.”

“So? Tell us another thing you influenced,” Eve said.

“I told a man to check his messages before he went to bed.”

“Which resulted in what?”

“Six hundred five lives saved.”

“What?”

“Fourteenth April, 1912. I asked Harold Cottam what messages had been received that evening. He was just getting off shift and was on his way to his quarters. He diverted to go check them, and within the hour the RMS Carpathia had changed course and was going full steam to the last known coordinates of the Titanic.”

“What happened in the original timeline?” Tanner asked.

“He checked the messages when his shift started the next morning. It was too late by then. There were no survivors.”

“Why is it that when you worked for me you were nothing but trouble, but retired, you seem to be a saint?” Mallory groused, standing. “Thanks for the company, and the entertainment. Happy Christmas.”

“I’m off out, too,” Eve said, rising.

“Good night,” Q said, elbowing James as he muttered a quiet ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

Tanner snorted.

“They’re more circumspect than the two of you ever were,” he noted.

“We were never trying to be circumspect,” Q replied.

“I could tell,” Tanner replied. “Tell me another story of St James the Retired Savior of History.”

“Don’t you need to get home to Molly?”

“She’s working tonight, or she’d have been here,” Tanner replied.

“I changed the bullets in a man’s gun. He had hollow points in it originally. She didn’t survive the damage. Almost didn’t survive anyway.”

“Who?”

“Malala Yousafzai.”

“Interesting choice.”

“How so?”

“Your previous stories included nudges that resulted in hundreds, or thousands, of lives saved. This time you rescued just one young woman.”

“Three, actually. Originally all three of the girls injured in the attack died. Now, they’ve all three survived. And I have a feeling about Malala. The time jumping gives you a sense of what lives will make connections with others and change things for the better.”

“Right, well, whether or not you're responsible for her survival, I'm glad she survived. I'm glad she has the chance to do great things with her life. Good things," Tanner said, standing. "It’s been good catching up with you, James. You know you’re welcome to visit us at Six without waiting to be Q’s plus-one, right? And if you ever do get bored in your retirement, saving history notwithstanding, we could use you training field agents.”

Q laughed at that.

“He’d have them all quitting the programme within a month.”

“You might be right, at that,” Tanner said. “Still, you can drop by on occasion. Or come by for dinner some time. Molly would love to see you.”

“Tell her we wish her a happy Christmas,” Q said. “And maybe we can try to plan something in the new year.”

Tanner nodded his good nights and left. Q poked bond in the side.

“Come on, St James. The catering staff would like to go home tonight.”

James stood and stretched and took the hand Q offered.

“I didn’t expect you to tell them. You know they don’t believe you, and they will bring it up again?”

“I didn’t expect to tell them either. It just happened. And when it comes up again, I’ll tell them I was testing the waters for writing a book of alternate histories.”

“Well, they can’t be any more fanciful than some of your after action reports,” Q said bumping James’ shoulder as they walked out of the restaurant to the Aston parked at the kerb.

“My after action reports were one hundred percent truthful.”

“You said a Komodo dragon ate your Walther.”

“Well. It ate the hand that was holding the gun. It was a logical assumption.”

Q just shook his head.

“I’ve got something for you,” James said as he unlocked the door of the Aston. “Picked it up on my way to the party.”

Q slid into the passenger seat and leaned back to pick up the paper-wrapped package James indicated. It was solid, rectangular, and the paper was very old.

“It’s a book,” Q said as James climbed into the car.

“Yes, it is.”

Q opened it. Inside the paper the book was wrapped in an odd bit of filmy, pleated fabric edged with ribbon, which he set aside.

“Persephassa,” he said, reading the title embossed on the cover. The book was old, but in brand new condition. He gently opened the cover and gasped.

“John Keats?”

“How could I not try?” James asked. “Your favorite poet, a creative genius, in a doomed love story with a fashion-obsessed flirt … They reminded me a bit of us, actually.”

“What did you do?”

“I sent him a letter dated 29th January, 1819.”

“Details, James! What did it say?”

“I told him that funds had been left in trust to him by his mother and grandmother, and directed him to speak with their solicitor, William Walton. I may have mentioned that the amounts in question would be more than sufficient to allow him to marry Fanny Brawne.”

“You are a closet romantic, James Bond.”

“I’m very much out of the closet, I think,” James said, glancing away from the road to smirk at Q, who rolled his eyes.

“I also told him that there was no cure for consumption, and that the best treatment options of the day did not include starving or bleeding a patient. I mentioned a few of the things that might work best, since I couldn’t exactly provide him with antibiotics, and said they might help, though there were no guarantees. And that the best thing for tuberculosis was not to catch it in the first place. I suggested he wear a mask when visiting friends and family with breathing troubles.”

Q set the book down in his lap and pulled out his phone to look up Keat’s changed history. His wikipedia page was three times as long as it had been, and included a wedding photo of Keats and Fanny Brawne.

“It was her wedding veil,” Q said, wonderingly, running a finger over the pleated fabric. “She sewed it herself, along with her wedding dress. They had two children. He died in 1854 at age 59. Fanny died three years later. He published six additional books of poetry and wrote nine plays.”

“We’ll find them and see them,” James assured him before he could even ask.

Q smiled, set down the phone, and opened the book.

“And this? How did you get it?”

“In the letter I sent, I said that if he found any value in the information I’d imparted, perhaps he would be willing to leave a signed copy of his next book of poetry with his solicitor, to be kept in trust until today, when I could pick it up.”

“Marvelous. Just marvelous.”

“Why yes, I am,” James replied with a grin that softened to a smile. “As are you. I couldn’t have done it without you. Any of it.”

“You do realize it was entirely by accident. I’d never even dreamed of trying to create a means for time travel. Didn’t believe it was possible.”

“But it is, and you did it.”

“And we’re just bloody lucky that I had tested the smart blood on myself before your injection, or I’d be like Eve, and M, and Tanner, thinking you were telling tall tales,” Q said. “Who knew that the real-time updates on your physical status would be a tie to real-time?”

“Oh, I think all time is real,” James said philosophically. “But this timeline is ours.”

“And you’re busy improving it.”

“I’d like to think so, though from other perspectives—”

“I honestly don’t care a whit for the perspectives of the Nazis or the Taliban. If they knew what you’d done and were angry over it, I’d be glad. But they don’t, and I’m still glad.”

“There is one more improvement I’d like to make,” James said.

“Only one? With all of history to choose from?”

“Let me rephrase. There’s one more improvement I’d like to make tonight, to our real-time timeline.”

“If you’ve got more Keats tucked away—” Q began.

“Not Keats,” James replied, parking the car and pulling a long sheer scarf from his coat pocket.

“Isn’t that Eve’s scarf?”

“I borrowed it.”

“‘Borrowed’ implies you asked permission,” Q said. “Did you borrow it, or steal it?”

“Neither, actually. She left it at the flat the last time she was over, and I’d meant to return it to her this evening. Forgot I had it, but I’m glad I do, now.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because I’m about to attempt to improve our timeline.”

“With Eve’s scarf?”

“With an old veil, a new book, a borrowed scarf,” James said, leaning across Q to open the glove box. “And yes, I know that tradition applies to weddings, not proposals, and you’re not a bride, but,” he paused and held out a small blue velvet box, “something blue.”


End file.
